Chapter 552 Chapter 552. Impossibly Shiny Shoes Are Our Only Clue, and Olivia Underlined Them Twice

Chapter 552: 552. Impossibly Shiny Shoes Are Our Only Clue, and Olivia Underlined Them Twice

Lia looked up from her ledger, the scratch of her quill pausing mid-stroke.

A faint, almost imperceptible curl touched the corner of her mouth, a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes but suggested she had just categorized William’s last comment under ’Dangerous Truths.’

She scribbled something hastily in the margin, a private notation that William chose not to pry into. He knew better than to ask a strategist what she was documenting about him.

Beside her, Olivia stirred with a dramatic groan. She pushed her beret up past her forehead, blinking blearily at the ceiling of the carriage.

"I had the most absurd dream," she announced to no one in particular, her voice thick with sleep. "A giant, brass magnifying glass was chasing me through a field of wheat."

"It was relentless... Very intimidating." Without waiting for a reaction, she pulled the beret back over her eyes and surrendered to sleep once more.

The carriage rolled on through the endless undulating waves of farmland while the sun climbed higher, bleaching the sky to a pale, indifferent blue.

It was a small, deceptively silly stretch of road, and William found himself clinging to it. He was grateful for every mile of this mundane scenery.

He knew the psychological cost of what they were doing: he knew that the gentler the journey, the more violently the reality would strike them upon arrival.

He let himself drink in the quiet, the rhythmic creak of leather and wood, knowing it was the last moment of peace they would have for a long time.

The royal orphanage sat on the frayed edge of a quiet district to the north of the capital. It was a rambling, weary building of grey stone that seemed to have grown out of the earth itself rather than being built upon it.

A vegetable garden, patchy and overgrown, lined the front, and the roof was a patchwork quilt of slate and tile clearly mended by a dozen different hands over decades of neglect. It looked less like a place of care and more like a place that had simply survived.

William and Olivia took a carriage there that afternoon. Kaela had not asked for permission; she had simply declared herself an escort, her hand resting meaningfully on the hilt of her sword as she boarded.

Lia had followed suit as treasurer, though no one could fathom what kind of expenditures she expected to encounter in such a desolate place.

They were met at the heavy oak door by Marta, an elderly caretaker whose posture reminded William of a bent willow tree twisted by time but stubbornly resilient.

Despite her age, she moved with the brisk, economical energy of someone decades younger. Before William could even extend a hand in introduction, she was already approaching them, carrying a tray bearing steaming mugs and a plate of ginger biscuits.

"Come in, come in."

"The air is turning sharp," she said, ushering them into a sitting room that smelled warmly of woodsmoke, dried herbs, and the comforting decay of old books.

"Thank you, Marta," William said, settling into a chair that creaked ominously.

He took a breath, steadying himself. "We’re here to ask about someone who stayed here years ago... A girl named Ellie."

Marta froze mid-motion, a biscuit suspended halfway to a saucer. Her lined face softened with a sudden, sharp recognition.

"Ellie?" she whispered. "Oh, the little elf who slept under the stairs."

"I remember her." A wistful smile touched her lips. "She was a quiet thing... Terrified of the dark, but somehow more terrified of being left alone in a bright room."

"We used to leave a candle burning on the third step every night, just so she knew someone was still there."

Olivia leaned forward, her detective persona snapping into place despite the casual setting. "Do you remember anything about the day she arrived? Who brought her here?"

Marta’s brow furrowed as she searched the dusty corridors of her memory. "A tall man... very precise in his movements."

"Anything about his face?" Olivia pressed, her pen poised over her notebook. "A scar? A particular color of hair?"

Marta shook her head slowly, a rueful laugh escaping her throat. "No, dear... His face has faded like an old photograph left in the sun."

"But I remember his boots... Those shoes were so impossibly shiny, you could have seen your own nose in them."

Olivia scribbled ’Impossibly shiny shoes’ into her notebook with the kind of grim intensity usually reserved for murder confessions. She underlined it twice, the quill scratching harshly against the parchment.

"Shiny shoes," Olivia muttered under her breath, adjusting her empty spectacles. "A mark of status..."

"A mark of deliberate presentation. Someone wanted to be seen but not remembered."

For the next hour, Marta proved to be an inexhaustible fountain of information, none of it, unfortunately, remotely useful to their investigation.

She spun elaborate sagas about which child had once swallowed a brass button, which cook had resigned in disgrace after ’the Great Soup Incident,’ and which ancient oak beam in the ceiling had been split by lightning during the year of the great snow.

Her stories were warm, nostalgic, and utterly maddening.

Kaela, who was already halfway through her third ginger biscuit, leaned toward Lia, her voice a conspiratorial whisper beneath the old woman’s rambling. "If this is what ’detective work’ feels like, Lia, I’d rather be fighting bandits."

"This is the most pointless investigation in the history of the kingdom."

Lia didn’t even glance up from her ledger, though her quill paused. "You are eating free biscuits, Kaela... In my book, that makes it a highly productive outing."

"Productive? My brain is turning into gingerbread."

But then, the atmosphere in the room shifted. The warmth that seemed to radiate from Marta suddenly flickered and died.

She was mid-sentence, recounting a story about a stray goat that had wandered into the laundry room, when her voice simply... stopped. She froze, her gaze dropping to her own withered hands as if she were seeing something written in the lines of her palms.

A heavy, uncomfortable silence descended upon the group. The crackling of the fire seemed unnaturally loud.

"That child," Marta said, her voice dropping an octave, stripped of its usual cheer. "She never cried."

"Not once when she arrived... Not when she fell, not when she was hungry, not when the other children teased her." Her eyes clouded with memory. "The first time she made a sound was about a month later."

"But it wasn’t a cry of pain."

Marta looked up at William, her eyes wide and distant. "Light came out of her palms... soft, like the glow of a candle through silk, but strange... and wrong."

"All the other children ran screaming, thinking she was some kind of demon... And that was when the man came back."

William felt a cold finger trace down his spine. "The man with the shiny shoes?"

Marta nodded slowly. "He came that same night... alone."

"He didn’t come to visit; he came to collect... I heard him speaking to the matron behind a closed door for hours."

"Their voices were low, like stones grinding together. After that night... everything changed."

"Ellie didn’t play with the others anymore... She was given a room all to herself."

"A room with a lock on the outside."

William and Olivia exchanged a sharp, knowing look. The implications screamed between them, unspoken: this wasn’t an accident.

Ellie hadn’t been abandoned; she had been acquired. Someone had been monitoring her development, waiting for the first sign of whatever power was breaking her apart from the inside.

"Marta," Olivia asked, her voice uncharacteristically soft. "Do you have anything else? Anything from that time?"

Marta didn’t answer immediately. She shuffled over to a cluttered sideboard, her movements suddenly frail, and rummaged through a drawer that groaned on its hinges.

When she returned, she held a faded, sepia-toned photograph.

"I found this when I was clearing out the old files last spring," Marta said, placing it on the table.

It was a group portrait: a row of orphans lined up on the front steps in their stiff Sunday clothes. They looked like a collection of broken dolls.

At the very end of the back row stood a tiny girl with unmistakable pink hair. She was clutching a tattered cloth doll against her chest as if it were her only lifeline.

What struck William most wasn’t her hair or her clothes, but her eyes. She was looking directly into the camera with an expression of eerie, unsettling calm, a stillness that no child should possess.

It was the look of someone who had already learned that the world was not a safe place.

William reached out and took the photograph with reverent care, his fingers tracing the edges of the worn paper. He stared at the small girl in the picture, seeing the ghost of the broken young woman currently suffering in Catherine’s house.

His chest tightened with a protective fury he couldn’t quite suppress.

He didn’t trust his voice; it felt too rough, too dangerous, so he simply asked, "May I keep this?"

Marta reached out and patted his hand. Her touch was warm, unexpectedly maternal, as though she had known him for years.

"Of course you may, dear."

"Take it... She needs someone to remember her as she was."